Tag: Homo sapiens

This is an article from Curious Kids, a new series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky! Where did the first person come from? – Maeve, age 8, Adelaide. What an awesome question, Maeve! It’s one…

It’s the mystery of all mysteries of science. Why is it that humans are so unusual compared to all other life? The key to solving this riddle lies in explaining the evolution of our large brains and exceptional intelligence. For as long as humanity has been contemplating our existence we must surely have been struck…

Were there any women around in the Palaeolithic Era? If popular culture is any guide you’d think not. And even archaeology itself has a long way to go to address a deeply ingrained bias towards men. It’s obvious that without women Homo sapiens could hardly be here today. But our cultural imaginings of the Palaeolithic…

One of the biggest surprises about our evolution revealed over just the last decade is the extent to which our ancestors engaged in amorous congress with the evolutionary cousins. Bonking the Neanderthals, it seems, was a bit of a pastime for the distant relatives. It happened many times in Siberia, East Asia, the Middle East…

It seems remarkable to me that well into the twenty-first century we still have so much to learn about many parts of the human body. Organs we’re all very familiar with – ones we take for granted – still have the power to surprise, in terms of new discoveries about their structure, function or evolution….

Thousands of years ago, the ancestors of modern humans left Africa to embark on a journey that would eventually take them across the globe. Yet we still know precious little about the momentous journeys they undertook. Now, new research by my team and me significantly recasts how we think about the early peopling of Southeast…

Australians have become oddly obsessed with our ancestry. Something in our collective psyche as a nation seems to be turning a healthy curiosity about the past into a deep yearning to belong. What’s fuelling this obsession? Our history as a nation of displaced immigrants? A nation still grappling with its history of dispossession, theft, murder…